8 ms·

Reddit announces plan to lay off 90 workers as subreddits plan mass protest

80 points by Stratoscope 3y ago

throwaway77384 3y ago
I'd recommend anyone to try out lemmy. Open source, federated, growing. (I signed up to the https://feddit.de/ https://feddit.de/ instance, but you could use https://beehaw.org/ https://beehaw.org/ as well, makes no difference where you sign up) More and more people are leaving Reddit for lemmy...and the more people migrate, the better. I went through the Digg exodus and have now left Reddit completely and don't miss it. If I need to read about a product, I'll still type "site:reddit.com" into google and hope that my old.reddit.com extension works for the forseeable future, but that will be the entirety of my interactions with Reddit until Lemmy replaces that as well.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- croutonwagon 3y ago
  My account on Reddit is 17 years old. I’ve been on lemmy for a couple days. I’m still very unsure about it. It’s not the technical changes of being federated, those didn’t take too much effort even for me with no experience with mastodon etc. It’s more the underlying politics that are jarring. The lead dev uses Castro as his picture and the other founder has mao on his personal page masthead. There’s a VERY prevalent anti western sentiment and even reccomending things like podcasts that use western viewpoints are downvoted hard. And I haven’t even been to their “communist” instance. The read I get is it’s got a lot of communism/socialism ideologues that have never lived under the thumb of the regimes they are advocating. Even on some of the inclusive specific ideas instances like beehaw, a prevalent reasoning is if your instance doesn’t defederate/block other instances unaligned with xyz, it means you aren’t dedicated to making a safe space and thus should be defederated too. It’s a dangerous game if that plays out on the larger more popular instances. It just feels off and as if I’m an outsider or unwelcome at best. Unsure if I will stick around. It’s not nearly same as the early Reddit days and especially the pre-digg migrations (and there were a couple) I also made sure to register to one that doesn’t profess any political leaning. But still, unsure given the overall vibe.
  - local_crmdgeon 3y ago
    I yearn for the day when Communists are seen the same way as (normal) people see Nazis. The European mass death counts are similar, without counting the Asian atrocities of the Great Leap Forward, Khmer Rouge, etc. The Swastika and the Hammer and Sickle both represent bankrupt ideologies. I would use a Communist website just as soon as I would use a Nazi website. I assume that's not going to be a popular opinion on the modern internet though.
    - croutonwagon 3y ago
      I dont really have an issue with ones political leanings. On that site or otherwise. No doubt I have conversed and even debated with some that are Communist or Socialist, both on the internet and in real life. I was just in Vietnam for 3 weeks with one of my good friends who has a LOT of family over there and some of them, many of them embrace socialism. Talking to many of those folks over drinks was very interesting. Its when it becomes a core portion of your identity and you are throwing it others faces or using it as a pedestal for elitism that it rubs me wrong. And that is the feeling I get on that site. Heck they even had a thread on the very topic the other day [1] Again I am not saying its bad. Just it gives a very weird vibe and it will depend on how the new users play into that and affect it. [1]: https://beehaw.org/post/443376?scrollToComments=true https://beehaw.org/post/443376?scrollToComments=true
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
havelhovel 3y ago
According to the article, Reddit has gone from 20 employees to 2,000 over the last ten years. As someone who still uses the old theme and has been conditioned to use Google instead of Reddit’s own search functionality, it’s hard to understand the additional value all that extra labor brought to users.
- AceJohnny2 3y ago
  holy shit 2000!? Now I understand where all that recommendation spam is coming from
  - vkazanov 3y ago
    Is this really that much? Reddit is a massively popular global service, after all.
    - MichaelZuo 3y ago
      That's roughly how much Twitter is running with today, and they have a sizable amount of physical servers. And it's been 8 months since the huge downsizing so it seems like that's sufficient to keep things stable
- Shorel 3y ago
  Ads. You now see more ads. They added value for the shareholders, not for us.
  - zpeti 3y ago
    The value for users is that Reddit exists. I hate ads as much as the next person, but you can’t expect a great website that’s unprofitable to be around forever. Eventually it’s going to shut down or change. Reddit has one of the best awards and paid tier plans in the world for a discussion board, yet they still couldn’t break even with it. You might love things that are free, but don’t expect them to last forever then. Nothing is free.
galacticaactual 3y ago
> “We’ve had a solid first half of the year, and this restructuring will position us to carry that momentum into the second half and beyond,” Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said in an email to employees announcing the layoffs. Love the tone-deaf, shallow corporatespeak from the top as per usual.
- prox 3y ago
  I am struggling to think of any CEOs that don’t use corpspeak. Are there any?
  - contrarian1234 3y ago
    Elon Musk lol
mmmmmbop 3y ago
> “We’ve had a solid first half of the year, and this restructuring will position us to carry that momentum into the second half and beyond,” Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said in an email to employees announcing the layoffs, according to the Journal. I know this is corp-speak, but it still such a horrible messaging. "We are doing great, but we're still going to fire people just to please our shareholders."
- tux2bsd 3y ago
  [dead]
- NoPicklez 3y ago
  It is horrible messaging, unless your message is directed at shareholders or potential investors.
mike_d 3y ago
Reddit is, I believe, the highest US traffic website that runs entirely on the cloud (as in they never invested in datacenters or POPs for traffic serving). To serve every single request they have to pay AWS and Fastly. I suspect that is why the per request pricing they are trying to pass off to 3rd party apps is so high. Unless things have changed since I left, it is just a highly efficient machine for shoveling investor money into the cloud furnace. I love Reddit to death and would go back in a heartbeat to fix it, but everything is just plastered in "don't touch my garbage" stickers. (Quick edit to add before the comments come rolling in, Netflix runs its business on the cloud - the expensive parts of pushing Stranger Things episodes into your living room run on real servers)
- politelemon 3y ago
  The cost is nowhere near, even with sufficient padding, to what they are asking. The move is a bit too blatant and obvious a push out.
  - renewiltord 3y ago
    Is it not possible for each 3rd party app user to create a client id and secret and give it to their instance of the app?
- princevegeta89 3y ago
  I don't know how many people have this practice, but Reddit also has become a good "answers" and "research" site to help find people what they want through Google Search. For example: If I search with "Alexa vs Google Home reddit", I am likely to find a lot of useful information from mostly real humans and their feedback openly available on the very site called Reddit. Omitting that "reddit" part in the query will lead me to the other news sites and blogs run by journalists and spammy media companies contain a lot of bullshit that I chose to only rely on Reddit for my quest for information. I wonder why Reddit would want to charge consumers of its API, without providing any premium services like let's say, Twilio etc. Reddit must focus on monetizing its content and more strategization that will bring in more ad-revenue or user-generated monetary value rather than going after 3rd party API consumers that ended up doing a much better job of building a simple front end app for their content.
nabakin 3y ago
I made a website for the protest. Could you folks critique it for me? https://save3rdpartyapps.com https://save3rdpartyapps.com
- linker3000 3y ago
  How's the list compiled and how frequently is it updated? I am a mod on two subs (both > 500K subscribers and they are going dark) and they're not listed.
- aetch 3y ago
  Is green meaning they are participating or black symbolizing they will be going on blackout. It would be nice if you could add a label at the top to say.
  - nabakin 3y ago
    Green means they are participating. Thanks, I'll put something for that. I wondered if it would be clear enough
- cheeze 3y ago
  The green is... very green. Only criticism. This is awesome. Thanks for putting it together. Edit: One more. Is it possible to differentiate subs that have said "we're going to go private for 2 days" and "we're shutting down permanently unless changes are made"? IIRC /r/music isn't planning on coming back.
  - nabakin 3y ago
    I would differentiate between those subs but I don't have a list of them. I've created a wiki page[1] if people want to start compiling that info [1] https://github.com/xNul/save-3rd-party-apps/wiki/List-of-Permanently-Shutting-Down-Subreddits https://github.com/xNul/save-3rd-party-apps/wiki/List-of-Per...
  - adhvaryu 3y ago
    > IIRC /r/music isn't planning on coming back. Same for me_irl I believe.

80 points by Stratoscope 3y ago

I'd recommend anyone to try out lemmy. Open source, federated, growing. (I signed up to the https://feddit.de/ https://feddit.de/ instance, but you could use https://beehaw.org/ https://beehaw.org/ as well, makes no difference where you sign up) More and more people are leaving Reddit for lemmy...and the more people migrate, the better. I went through the Digg exodus and have now left Reddit completely and don't miss it. If I need to read about a product, I'll still type "site:reddit.com" into google and hope that my old.reddit.com extension works for the forseeable future, but that will be the entirety of my interactions with Reddit until Lemmy replaces that as well.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
croutonwagon 3y ago
My account on Reddit is 17 years old. I’ve been on lemmy for a couple days. I’m still very unsure about it. It’s not the technical changes of being federated, those didn’t take too much effort even for me with no experience with mastodon etc. It’s more the underlying politics that are jarring. The lead dev uses Castro as his picture and the other founder has mao on his personal page masthead. There’s a VERY prevalent anti western sentiment and even reccomending things like podcasts that use western viewpoints are downvoted hard. And I haven’t even been to their “communist” instance. The read I get is it’s got a lot of communism/socialism ideologues that have never lived under the thumb of the regimes they are advocating. Even on some of the inclusive specific ideas instances like beehaw, a prevalent reasoning is if your instance doesn’t defederate/block other instances unaligned with xyz, it means you aren’t dedicated to making a safe space and thus should be defederated too. It’s a dangerous game if that plays out on the larger more popular instances. It just feels off and as if I’m an outsider or unwelcome at best. Unsure if I will stick around. It’s not nearly same as the early Reddit days and especially the pre-digg migrations (and there were a couple) I also made sure to register to one that doesn’t profess any political leaning. But still, unsure given the overall vibe.
- local_crmdgeon 3y ago
  I yearn for the day when Communists are seen the same way as (normal) people see Nazis. The European mass death counts are similar, without counting the Asian atrocities of the Great Leap Forward, Khmer Rouge, etc. The Swastika and the Hammer and Sickle both represent bankrupt ideologies. I would use a Communist website just as soon as I would use a Nazi website. I assume that's not going to be a popular opinion on the modern internet though.
  - croutonwagon 3y ago
    I dont really have an issue with ones political leanings. On that site or otherwise. No doubt I have conversed and even debated with some that are Communist or Socialist, both on the internet and in real life. I was just in Vietnam for 3 weeks with one of my good friends who has a LOT of family over there and some of them, many of them embrace socialism. Talking to many of those folks over drinks was very interesting. Its when it becomes a core portion of your identity and you are throwing it others faces or using it as a pedestal for elitism that it rubs me wrong. And that is the feeling I get on that site. Heck they even had a thread on the very topic the other day [1] Again I am not saying its bad. Just it gives a very weird vibe and it will depend on how the new users play into that and affect it. [1]: https://beehaw.org/post/443376?scrollToComments=true https://beehaw.org/post/443376?scrollToComments=true

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

havelhovel 3y ago

According to the article, Reddit has gone from 20 employees to 2,000 over the last ten years. As someone who still uses the old theme and has been conditioned to use Google instead of Reddit’s own search functionality, it’s hard to understand the additional value all that extra labor brought to users.

AceJohnny2 3y ago
holy shit 2000!? Now I understand where all that recommendation spam is coming from
- vkazanov 3y ago
  Is this really that much? Reddit is a massively popular global service, after all.
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    That's roughly how much Twitter is running with today, and they have a sizable amount of physical servers. And it's been 8 months since the huge downsizing so it seems like that's sufficient to keep things stable
Shorel 3y ago
Ads. You now see more ads. They added value for the shareholders, not for us.
- zpeti 3y ago
  The value for users is that Reddit exists. I hate ads as much as the next person, but you can’t expect a great website that’s unprofitable to be around forever. Eventually it’s going to shut down or change. Reddit has one of the best awards and paid tier plans in the world for a discussion board, yet they still couldn’t break even with it. You might love things that are free, but don’t expect them to last forever then. Nothing is free.

galacticaactual 3y ago

> “We’ve had a solid first half of the year, and this restructuring will position us to carry that momentum into the second half and beyond,” Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said in an email to employees announcing the layoffs. Love the tone-deaf, shallow corporatespeak from the top as per usual.

prox 3y ago
I am struggling to think of any CEOs that don’t use corpspeak. Are there any?
- contrarian1234 3y ago
  Elon Musk lol

mmmmmbop 3y ago

> “We’ve had a solid first half of the year, and this restructuring will position us to carry that momentum into the second half and beyond,” Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said in an email to employees announcing the layoffs, according to the Journal. I know this is corp-speak, but it still such a horrible messaging. "We are doing great, but we're still going to fire people just to please our shareholders."

tux2bsd 3y ago
[dead]
NoPicklez 3y ago
It is horrible messaging, unless your message is directed at shareholders or potential investors.

mike_d 3y ago

Reddit is, I believe, the highest US traffic website that runs entirely on the cloud (as in they never invested in datacenters or POPs for traffic serving). To serve every single request they have to pay AWS and Fastly. I suspect that is why the per request pricing they are trying to pass off to 3rd party apps is so high. Unless things have changed since I left, it is just a highly efficient machine for shoveling investor money into the cloud furnace. I love Reddit to death and would go back in a heartbeat to fix it, but everything is just plastered in "don't touch my garbage" stickers. (Quick edit to add before the comments come rolling in, Netflix runs its business on the cloud - the expensive parts of pushing Stranger Things episodes into your living room run on real servers)

politelemon 3y ago
The cost is nowhere near, even with sufficient padding, to what they are asking. The move is a bit too blatant and obvious a push out.
- renewiltord 3y ago
  Is it not possible for each 3rd party app user to create a client id and secret and give it to their instance of the app?
princevegeta89 3y ago
I don't know how many people have this practice, but Reddit also has become a good "answers" and "research" site to help find people what they want through Google Search. For example: If I search with "Alexa vs Google Home reddit", I am likely to find a lot of useful information from mostly real humans and their feedback openly available on the very site called Reddit. Omitting that "reddit" part in the query will lead me to the other news sites and blogs run by journalists and spammy media companies contain a lot of bullshit that I chose to only rely on Reddit for my quest for information. I wonder why Reddit would want to charge consumers of its API, without providing any premium services like let's say, Twilio etc. Reddit must focus on monetizing its content and more strategization that will bring in more ad-revenue or user-generated monetary value rather than going after 3rd party API consumers that ended up doing a much better job of building a simple front end app for their content.

nabakin 3y ago

I made a website for the protest. Could you folks critique it for me? https://save3rdpartyapps.com https://save3rdpartyapps.com

linker3000 3y ago
How's the list compiled and how frequently is it updated? I am a mod on two subs (both > 500K subscribers and they are going dark) and they're not listed.
aetch 3y ago
Is green meaning they are participating or black symbolizing they will be going on blackout. It would be nice if you could add a label at the top to say.
- nabakin 3y ago
  Green means they are participating. Thanks, I'll put something for that. I wondered if it would be clear enough
cheeze 3y ago
The green is... very green. Only criticism. This is awesome. Thanks for putting it together. Edit: One more. Is it possible to differentiate subs that have said "we're going to go private for 2 days" and "we're shutting down permanently unless changes are made"? IIRC /r/music isn't planning on coming back.
- nabakin 3y ago
  I would differentiate between those subs but I don't have a list of them. I've created a wiki page[1] if people want to start compiling that info [1] https://github.com/xNul/save-3rd-party-apps/wiki/List-of-Permanently-Shutting-Down-Subreddits https://github.com/xNul/save-3rd-party-apps/wiki/List-of-Per...
- adhvaryu 3y ago
  > IIRC /r/music isn't planning on coming back. Same for me_irl I believe.